Critique of first python code

[Arnaud Delobelle]

On Feb 8, 7:20 pm, "Zack" <gol... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all. I'm just starting to pick up python. I wanted to play with nested
> lists so first I wrote a little bit of code to create arbitrarily nested
> lists (grow). Then I wrote a breadth first search.  I'm putting this small
> snippet up asking for criticism. Was there a more elegant way to do what I'm
> doing? Anything that goes against convention?  Anything that fingers me as a
> c++ programmer? Are there standard modules that do these kind of things?
> Thanks for any feedback.
>
> ##############################
> from random import randint
>
> Val = 0
>
> def grow(L,depth):
>    '''grows L by appending integers and arbitrarily nested lists with a
> maximum
>    depth. Returns L.'''
>    global Val
>    if depth == 0:
>       return L
>    else:
>       choice = randint(1,2)
>       if 1 == choice:
>          # add a numerical literal
>          Val += 1
>          L.append(Val)
>          return grow(L,depth-1)
>       elif 2 == choice:
>          # add a list
>          L.append( grow([],depth-1) )
>          return grow(L,depth-1)

How about:

from itertools import count
from random import randrange

def grow(L, depth, counter=count()):
   '''grow L by appending integers and arbitrarily nested lists with a
   maximum depth. Returns L.'''
   if depth == 0:
      return L
   else:
      L.append(counter.next() if randrange(2) else grow([], depth-1))
      return grow(L, depth-1)


> def traverse(L, count=0):
>    '''Prints the non iterable object of L in breadth first order.
>    Returns count + the number of non iterables in L.'''
>    if L == []:
>       return count
>    n = []
>    for e in L:
>       if not hasattr(e,'__iter__'):
>          print e,
>          count += 1
>       else:
>          n[:] += e
I would write n.extend(e) here (or n += e)
>    print '\n'
>    return traverse(n,count)
>
> L = grow([],10)
> C = traverse(L)
> ##############################
>
> --
> Zack

--
Arnaud